Philosophy. A lot of people think it’s about just ideas. It’s not. It’s about fights too. Dirty, personal fights.
And in the ring of German philosophy, two giants went at it like they were fighting over the last drink at the bar—Schopenhauer and Hegel.
One was a bitter, scowling cynic who thought life was a pain in the ass.
The other was a smooth-talking idealist with a vision of progress and enlightenment.
The world picked a side. Schopenhauer didn’t care.
He wasn’t just mad about ideas—he was mad because Hegel got the fame he wanted.
And Schopenhauer? He was stuck in the back, ignored by the intellectual world he knew he deserved to rule.
This wasn’t just a philosophical debate; it was personal, damn personal.
1. The Bitter Start: It Was Never Just About Philosophy
Let’s get something straight—Schopenhauer didn’t just hate Hegel because of some intellectual disagreement over abstract ideas.
No, that’s too clean. That’s for textbooks.
He hated Hegel because Hegel was a giant, and Schopenhauer was the overlooked genius, the guy in the corner of the room with a glass of whiskey, glaring at the world that refused to recognize him.
It wasn’t just that Hegel was more famous—it was that Hegel got the position Schopenhauer wanted at the University of Berlin.
Hegel was the darling of the German philosophical world.
And Schopenhauer? He was an afterthought, sitting in the shadows, nursing a quiet rage. He didn’t get the chair he craved, and that ate him up.
You see, in philosophy, fame and recognition matter.
Hegel had the audience, the praise. Schopenhauer? He had the knowledge.
But no one cared. So, he took out his frustration the only way he knew how—by turning that resentment into intellectual war.
2. The Thing-in-Itself vs. Hegel’s “God Through the Back Door”
Philosophers love to argue over abstract ideas. That’s the game, right? Schopenhauer and Hegel?
They were at war over Kant’s legacy.
See, Kant dropped the bomb with his theory about the thing-in-itself—the idea that we can never really know the world as it is.
We only get appearances, filtered through our own senses and minds.
Schopenhauer ran with that. He thought it was the cornerstone of all metaphysical thought.
And then here comes Hegel, with his absolute idealism, talking about a grand system where everything fits into a neat little progression toward self-realization, toward this ultimate “Absolute.”
Schopenhauer saw right through that. He wasn’t buying it. To him, Hegel was trying to sneak God back into the picture, dressed up in fancy, philosophical lingo.
Hegel’s system, in Schopenhauer’s eyes, was just Spinozism in disguise.
Schopenhauer didn’t think the world was some grand dialectical process. He thought it was a dirty, nasty struggle where desires crash against one another, unrelenting, unyielding.
3. The Will: Schopenhauer’s Answer to Hegel’s Nonsense
So, Schopenhauer had his answer to Hegel. Forget the Absolute. Forget the grand unfolding of history.
What really mattered, he argued, was the will. Forget some perfect unity or some ideal coming into being.
Life isn’t some tidy philosophical concept. Life is about suffering, struggle, and desire.
Everything, every living being, is driven by an insatiable will.
And the will isn’t pretty—it’s selfish, violent, and always wanting more.
You think you’ve satisfied it? Ha.
The will just finds a new craving. That’s what life is: an endless, grinding cycle of needs and desires, without any real purpose other than more of the same.
Schopenhauer rejected Hegel’s optimism.
Hegel had this shiny idea that the world was marching toward progress, that everything would work itself out.
But Schopenhauer? He wasn’t interested in progress.
He wasn’t interested in some idealized future.
No, he saw the world as a battleground, where every creature, every individual, was locked in an eternal fight against their own nature, a fight they could never win.
4. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel: The Holy Trinity of Betrayal
But Schopenhauer’s animosity didn’t stop at Hegel. He lumped Fichte and Schelling in with him, accusing them all of the same intellectual sin—collapsing the external world into the ego, the subject.
It was like they all tried to smooth things over, make everything fit into this neat, cozy framework where the mind and the world were some harmonious whole.
Schopenhauer didn’t buy it. He couldn’t stand it. For him, that wasn’t philosophy—it was spiritual self-indulgence. It was philosophy for people who didn’t want to face the ugly truth of existence.
The truth, according to Schopenhauer, was that the world wasn’t “one.” The world was a mess. It was a fight. And the sooner you accepted that, the better.
5. Schopenhauer’s Influence: Forgotten, But Not Gone
Let’s face it: Hegel got the fame. He was the rock star.
Schopenhauer was the guy in the crowd, raising his fist, screaming for attention.
But despite his bitterness, Schopenhauer had a kind of influence that Hegel never quite grasped.
His ideas about the will, about human suffering, reached farther than most people realized.
Freud? He read Schopenhauer.
Wittgenstein? Same.
Einstein? You bet.
Schopenhauer’s grim view of the world, his insistence on the will as the driving force of human action, influenced not just philosophers, but scientists, too.
Hell, even Darwin gave Schopenhauer a nod in The Descent of Man.
Hegel? He was mostly a staple of continental philosophy.
He influenced Marx, sure, but did he have any impact on science?
On psychology?
Nope. Schopenhauer, on the other hand, was shaping the intellectual world in ways people didn’t even see coming.
6. Schopenhauer’s Legacy: Nietzsche, Hegel, and the Twist of Fate
Nietzsche. He loved Schopenhauer—until he didn’t.
Schopenhauer was Nietzsche’s first philosophical love.
But then Nietzsche grew, evolved, and started seeing the world in a different light.
It’s almost funny—Nietzsche, in his later years, admitted that Schopenhauer’s blind hatred for Hegel may have kept him from fully appreciating Hegel’s ideas.
Hegel wasn’t the monster Schopenhauer made him out to be.
Nietzsche realized there was more to Hegel than Schopenhauer had let on.
In a twist of irony, Schopenhauer’s venomous bias might have kept Nietzsche from exploring a crucial part of his own intellectual development.
7. The Final Showdown: Schopenhauer’s Painful Victory
So, what do we take away from this intellectual boxing match? Did Schopenhauer really win?
Did his anger, his hatred, his personal vendetta change the course of philosophy?
The answer isn’t as clean as a knockout. Schopenhauer’s legacy, while darker, had a lasting impact on existentialism, on the study of the unconscious, on science.
Hegel’s, on the other hand, largely stayed in the realm of political theory and continental philosophy.
Both men’s ideas lingered, but in different ways.
But in the end, Schopenhauer was the one who had the last laugh.
Not because he got fame—he didn’t. But because the bitter truth he saw in the world lived on long after Hegel’s idealism faded into the background.
And that? Well, that’s the kind of victory that no one saw coming.
Schopenhauer may have lost the battle of fame, but he won the battle of truth. And when you’ve seen the world as he did, that’s enough.
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